A few evenings ago, I visited ZocDoc. The youthful company, seemingly approaching middle age among startups that began in 2007, looks to be thriving. ZocDoc keeps its headquarter downtown in a loft-like, mainly open, SoHo space replete with a ping-pong table, open kitchen and mock street signs pointing (abstractly) to concepts like “Make Work Fun” and “Patients First.” The vibe amongst the crowd – a hundred or so by my crude estimate: a mix of doctors and entrepreneurs, a few journalists, insurance executives and investors, along with some ZocDoc employees – was strictly positive.

According to its website*, ZocDoc is:

… a free service that allows patients to find a nearby doctor or dentist who accepts their insurance, see their real-time availability, and instantly book an appointment via ZocDoc.com or ZocDoc’s free apps for iPhone or Android.

Basically it’s a small-but-not-tiny, growing health IT company that provides an on-line way, like an app, for people to find doctors who accept their insurance and have available time slots. (Think of OpenTable, but for health care?) Since 2007, ZocDoc has expanded. The company, with some 450 employees, claims over 2.5 million users monthly in over 1,800 cities.* Its business model includes that doctors, dentists and possibly other provider-types, pay an annual fee to participate ($300 per month, an employee told me). Since it started, ZocDoc has received significant press and gained prominent investors like Goldman Sachs and Jeff Bezos. It’s won awards as a top-notch place to work. Kudos!

Dr. Kharraz opened with a question on how technology and medical startups, like ZocDoc, will fare in the context of Obamacare and upcoming, uncertain changes in the health care landscape. Daschle was first to answer, and he did so by congratulating the company for its talent and the passion it brings to a turbulent, transformative health care environment. A fit-looking Frist, a former heart surgeon, spoke enthusiastically on opportunities in the private sector. Other panelists chimed in, with words like “value,” “exciting,” “risk,” “entrepreneurial,” “wellness” and “opportunity.”

No word cloud is needed; we were in one. And it’s hard not to be charmed by the brightness of enthusiastic and eager tech-folks who want to make it easier for people to get to doctors they might need. In theory. The ZocDoc space bore no semblance to any hospital or office where I’ve been a doctor or a patient.

At the end of the discussion, one of the panelists noted the group’s apparent agreement on the terrific-ness of the enterprise. Rather than opening the session up to questions from the audience, we were invited to mingle and ask questions of the speakers. If I’d had the chance, I’d have asked a few:

1. Does ZocDoc help people get well, or is it simply a web-based system for procuring appointments with doctors who sign on?

2. What does ZocDoc offer that another health IT program, or portal, can’t or couldn’t provide?

3. How does ZocDoc help patients who don’t have insurance? (OK, it doesn’t; but that’s not the company’s aim)

4. Sure, ZocDoc has value. It helps a small fraction of the population who might be traveling and for one reason or another need to make a doctor’s appointment without having time to ask around or call in, or prefer to just click for an appointment (as I do for groceries), but…Does ZocDoc improve the quality of health care received?

5. How do you reconcile the money being invested in start-ups like these, which make health care “easier” for a few, with the lack of resources faced by real, nearby NYC hospitals closing?

Keep in mind, my concerns are based in my enthusiasm for technology in health care, and for giving providers, aka doctors, a “shot in the arm” of modern-ness. Enter the 21st Century…But there’s no hands-on a patient, no real medicine here. It’s too clean. I’m not convinced the value’s true.

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*all links accessed 9/19/13

addendum, 9/20: a ZocDoc representative has informed me by email that the fee for providers is based on an annual contract priced at about $300/month, and so I have adjusted the post accordingly. (I’d originally stated that the fee was approximately $300 per year, based on my recollection of what an employee told me during the event.) – ES

Last week I had the opportunity to hear and meet Dr. Edward Shortliffe at the New York Academy of Medicine. He’s a maven in the field of biomedical informatics (that would be the “other” BMI), and a pioneer at that. He mentioned that he began working on an electronic health record (EHR) when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in 1968.

Shortliffe emphasized the multidisciplinary nature of the field – that clinicians and computer science-oriented types need be involved for health information technology (HIT) to be effective. “Human health is at the core of it,” he said. The goal of biomedical informatics isn’t for computers to replace humans, he said, but for doctors to learn how to use it – as a tool – so that we (human doctors) can practice better medicine.

He reviewed the 50-year history of the field. The super-simple summary goes something like this: in the 1960s hospitals developed early information systems; in the 1970s, early decision support and electronic health records (EHRs) emerged at hospitals and large institutions; in the 1980s clinical research trials led to databases involving patients across medical centers; in the 1990s, progress in science (especially genetics) led to modern biomedical informatics. Now, the vast work includes clinical, imaging, biology (molecular, genomic, proteomic data) and public health.

If you’re interested in the future of health IT, as I am, you might want to take a glance at a perspective published recently by Dr. Shortcliffe and two coauthors, Putting Health IT on the Path to Success, in JAMA. The authors consider the slow pace of implementing HIT, and suggest that the solution rests with patient-centric Health Record Banks (HRBs):

“…Health record banks are community organizations that put patients in charge of a comprehensive copy of all their personal, private health information, including both medical records and additional data that optionally may be added by the patient. The patient explicitly controls who may access which parts of the information in his or her individual account.

Today Laura Landro reports in the WSJ on the Image Share Project. According to her Informed Patient column, people who want to access and share radiology images pertaining to their health, such as MRIs or CT scans, can do so using this program. The platform enables easier transmission of electronic versions of large, detailed images. Pilot medical centers involved include New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, UCSF and the Mayo Clinic.

a doctor looks at a medical image on a computer (NIH, NIBIB)

The Radiological Society of North America is on board with the program. This makes sense, among other reasons because funding comes from the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). According to the WSJ: “This is all about giving patients control of their health information and engaging them in their own care,” said David Mendelson, director of radiology-information systems at Mount Sinai and a principal investigator on the project.

I’m fine with this – how could I not be? Great, super, and of course patients should have access to electronic files of their x-ray images! Except why has it taken so long? Hard to fathom that in 2013 we’re exploring “pilot” sites where patients can enroll in a program that allows them to transmit their electronic health images to doctors in other cities.

Cyberchondria is an unfounded health concern that develops upon searching the Internet for information about symptoms or a disease. A cyberchondriac is someone who surfs the Web about a medical problem and worries about it unduly.

Through Wikipedia, I located what might be the first reference to cyberchondria in a medical journal: a 2003 article in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. A section on the new diagnosis starts like this: “Although not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘cyberchondria’ has been coined to describe the excessive use of internet health sites to fuel health anxiety.” That academic report links back to a 2001 story in the Independent, “Are you a Cyberchondriac?”

Interesting that the term – coined in a newspaper story and evaluated largely by IT experts – has entered the medical lexicon. I wonder how the American Psychiatry Association will handle cyberchondria in the upcoming DSM-5.

The idea is that people who use health care would each be assigned a universal patient identifier, or UPI. This unique number would link to a person’s health records. In principle it would facilitate transfer of a patient’s medical history between doctors, hospitals and, likely, insurance companies. There are arguments pro – mainly having to do with efficiency and patient safety; and against – mainly having to do with privacy.

My issue is that it reminds me of Auschwitz. But apart from that particular association, labeling people with numbers seems dehumanizing – what’s already a big negative in modern health care. I/we need to realize that already we have numbers. Most people have social security numbers. I have several hospital ID numbers and insurance company numbers.

As for privacy, that’s history, or an illusion. If someone wants to know something about almost any person here in the U.S, they can find it. We inhabit a grid.

The debate reminds me of when I was an oncology fellow, and I treated a woman from Central America who had breast cancer. After she underwent a biopsy at our hospital, I reviewed the slides with the pathologist and wrote orders and injected her with chemotherapy. For 15 years or so I followed her in the clinic, and at some point, maybe 5 years after her diagnosis, she told me that her name was not what I’d thought or what her chart said it was. She’d used a cousin’s name and insurance card to get the care she needed.

More recently, I was with a relative who had an MRI. Upon registering at the radiology facility, he had to show a state-issued picture ID besides his insurance card. The issue was clear: with some 50 million or so Americans uninsured, and others without the ready means to cover co-pays, some people are assuming other patients’ identities to get the care they want or need.

The costs to insurers and hospitals of patient identity fraud – what in some instances I might liken to a hungry person stealing a loaf of bread – may underlie this topic’s appearance in the WSJ.

Over the weekend I developed another bout of diverticulitis. Did the usual: fluids, antibiotics, rest, avoided going to the ER, cancelled travel plans.

One of my doctors asked a very simple question: is this happening more frequently? The answer, we both knew, was yes. But I don’t have a Personal Health Record (PHR) that in principle, through a few clicks, would give a time-frame graph of the bouts and severity of the episodes over the past several years.

The last time this happened, and the time before that, I thought I’d finally start a PHR. Like most compulsive patients, I keep records about my health. In the folder in my closet in a cheap old-fashioned filing box, the kind with a handled top that flips open, I’ve got an EKG from 15 years ago, an OR report from my spine surgery, copies of lab results that the ordering physicians chose to send me, path reports from my breasts, a skin lesion or two, and, more recently a colonic polyp, bone density studies from 2004, EMGs and more, essentially miscellaneous results.

None of the records I have are digital.

A few years back I considered using Google Health. But their service, as I understood it, involved scanning documents and uploading them to the Cloud, or paying someone else to do so. That sounded like a hassle. But even had I done that, I wouldn’t have been able to, say, see a graph of my hemoglobin since 1986, or something as simple as my weight changes over time. When Google Health folded a few months back, I was disappointed. At the same time, I breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn’t invested my personal and limited energies into putting my records there.

But I needed no convincing. What I need is software, or a platform, that’s user-friendly and secure. Ideally mine would mesh with my physicians’ records, but my doctors use a variety of record systems. So it’s up to me to integrate the data, if anyone will. The problem is there’s little out there, as best I can tell, that’s intended for patients. Most IT companies are, for now, focused on getting doctors to sign on.

So I’ll start an Excel spreadsheet, today, on my PC. There must be a better way.

A funny thing happened at my doctor’s appointment on Friday. I checked in, and after confirming that my address and insurance hadn’t changed since last year, waited for approximately 10 minutes. A worker of some sort, likely a med-tech, called me to “take my vitals.”

She took my blood pressure with a cuff that made my germ-phobic self run for self-regulation, i.e. I stayed quiet and didn’t express my concern about the fact that it looked like it hadn’t been washed in years. I value this doctor among others in my care, and I didn’t want to complain about anything. Then the woman took my weight. And then she asked if she could take my picture, “for the hospital record.”

I couldn’t contain my wondering self. “What is the purpose of the picture?” I asked.

“It’s for the record,” she explained. “For security.”

I thought about it. My picture is pretty much public domain at this point in my life, a decision I made upon deciding not to blog anonymously. Besides, most everyone at the medical center used to know me, including the receptionists, janitors, cafeteria cashiers, nurses’ aides, social workers, deans, full professors, geneticists, fellows in surgery and old-time voluntary physicians, among others who work there. So why didn’t I want this unidentified woman who works in my oncologist’s office to take my picture?

It made me uncomfortable, and here’s the reason: My picture is a reminder that, without it, I might be like any other patient in the system. They (administrators?, nurses, other docs, maybe even my future doctors) will need or want the picture to recall and be certain who Elaine Schattner is.

Don’t get me wrong. I agreed to the photo after all of maybe 20 seconds deliberating. (And my doctor was, I soon learned, duly informed I’d “had an issue” with it. Was that for just asking the reason?) The unidentified med-tech person used an oddly small, ordinary pink camera to complete her task.

When I met with my doctor, she explained that the photo is for security and, essentially, to reduce the likelihood of errors. The hospital has records of so many thousands of patients, many who have similar or identical names. There are good reasons to make sure that your notes on “Sally Smith” are entered into the chart of “Sally Smith” who is your patient.

It’s understandable. I remember when at the nurses’ station there’d be a sign (on “our” side) saying something like “CAREFUL: Anna Gonzalez in 202, Alma Gonzalez in 204b,” or something like that.

Patients blur.

It’s hard, veritably impossible, for most doctors and nurses to keep mental track of all of the patients they’ve ever seen and examined. There’s utility in the new system. Yes, it’s a good idea for a doctor, say upon receiving a call from a woman she hasn’t seen in 3 or 6 or 9 years, to see her picture in the chart, as a reminder.

But I hope my doctors know who I am, and not just what I look like in the image.

Forbes kept a close eye on the annual ASCO meeting in Chicago. On THE MEDICINE SHOW, Forbes’ Matthew Herper provides a précis of a speech by outgoing ASCO President Dr. George Sledge.

Here are my two favorite parts:

“So what happens when, a few years from now, a patient walks into a doctor’s office and hands a physician a memory stick loaded with gigabytes of personal genomic data?” Sledge asks. His answer: the flood of data will help doctors and patients, but things will get “very, very complicated.”

and

…Doctors will need real-time access to clinical data from all practice settings. This in turn will require interoperable databases using common terminology. Health information technology should offer on-the-spot decision support to oncologists and patients facing the increasingly complex tapestry revealed by modern genomics. It should provide individualized, ready access to a clinical trials systems. It should support appropriate coverage and reimbursement for services. And it should aggregate data so that we can learn from every patient’s experience.

What he’s saying, in a nutshell, is that oncologists will need to know science and have access to effective HIT to interpret and act upon the ever-growing pile of info on cancer genetics as it applies to people in general and individual patients. I recommend the full read.

An added perk in the MEDICINE SHOW piece is a terrific, gyrating DNA model courtesy of Wikipedia (@Forbes!).

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For an additional twist (PM, 6/7), turns out Wikipedia offers a mutable Medicine Show of its own.

Med-blog grand rounds this week is hosted by e-patient Dave, who is Dave deBronkart, a real man who was diagnosed with a renal cell (kidney) cancer a few years back. He’s a terrific speaker and an Internet friend.

By coincidence I was searching for the definition of an e-patient, and came upon it there, in a video of his presentation at the TED (for those of you in the 1990s, that would be Technology, Entertainment, Design ideas worth spreading) “x” – meaning independently-organized meeting held in Maastricht a few weeks ago. Dave and others spoke on the topic of “The Year of Patients Rising.”

The book is no longer evident at the website for STI (Scientific Therapeutic Information), the company that provided authorship “help.” I tried to get a copy on Amazon.com, where it’s said to be temporarily out-of-stock. The work remains listed in the Library of Congress on-line catalog: #99015420.

I’m reminded of clinical handbooks I used all the time when I was practicing hematology and oncology. At the hospital, I’d get freebie, small-sized chemo regimen primers that conveniently fit into my white coat pocket. In retrospect, perhaps I didn’t adequately check the authors’ credentials on those mini-book sources. It was too easy to take that information and keep it at hand, literally, especially in the times before we had constant Web access.

And I’m struck by how the Internet – that infinite bucket of once-lowly or at-best mixed-quality information doctors disparaged for years – may prove a better information source than printed books.

It’s a minor paradox, or a twist in trust –

Now, with a few clicks if you know where to look, you can get recommendations for chemo dosing from reliable sources, like the NIH or peer-reviewed journal articles. Although transparency about physicians’ ties to industry is not nearly yet where it should be, you can find out about more about an author’s connections and potential conflicts of interest than at any time in medical publishing history.